Why did China decide to be a self-sustained actor in Cyber Warfare?
Cyberwarfare has almost become a norm for countries. However, few countries have developed it for offensive purposes and few defensive. As it is projected broadly China is perhaps a country with an offensive bend in this direction. Its motivation largely is to build strong deterrence against its major rival US.
As per researchers, there are three reasons driving China’s self-sustained cyber offensive front “deterrence through the infiltration of critical infrastructure; military technological espionage to gain military knowledge, and industrial espionage to gain economic advantage.”
As we all are aware of the fact that cyber warfare has given dominance to China, as it is both a threat and key to success for china from its adversaries. Recently, researchers shed new light on Beijing’s suspected use of hacking to fortify its economy. Hackers linked to the Chinese government have attempted to steal sensitive data from Technology and Manufacturing firms in the US, Europe, and Asia.
The hacking activity was first observed when the hackers broke into an Asian subsidiary of a major manufacturing and technology company. The hackers besieged blueprints for producing materials with extensive applications to the pharmaceutical and aerospace sectors. The firm Cybereason (A boston-based cyber security firm), discovered the hacking activity last year but believed that the hacking campaign started in at least 2019, and also suggested that a great amount of data could have been stolen in the intervening time.
Chinese state becomes the trending hot topic these days as the states operated several cyber warfare campaigns against different nations. On 27 April 2022, Chinese Cyberspies was highlighted for targeting the Russian Military
According to the Secureworks reports, the China-linked state-sponsored Bronze President cyberespionage group had targeted Russian speakers with updated PlugX. In March 2022, CTU researchers identified a malevolent achievable file impersonating as a Russian-language document. The filename is “Blagoveshchensk — Blagoveshchensk Border Detachment.exe”, but the default setting on Windows does not exhibit the .exe file extension. The file uses a PDF icon for reliability. The targeted Russian city (Blagoveshchensk) is close to China Border. This connection suggests that the name of the file was chosen to board officials or military staff familiar with the region.
In recent weeks a Chinese state-sponsored espionage group ‘Override Panda’ also known as ‘Naikon’ ‘Hellsing’, and ‘Bronze Geneva’ has resurfaced with a new phishing attack aiming to steal sensitive information. The Chinese Advanced Persistent Threat group used a spear-phishing email to deliver a beacon of a Red Team framework known as ‘Viper’. The target of the cyberattack is unknown but with a high probability, it is assumed that it might be a government institution from a South Asian Country.
With the above-mentioned instances, we can say that China is a self-sustained superpower having significant Cyber offensive capabilities; the state is capable enough to launch several hacking campaigns in the same month, without taking any foreign support.
